Reconstructing Cambridge Analytica's "psychological warfare tool"

Building a personality classifier in R - using facebook data, machine learning and personality traits

Written by Johannes on 28 March, 2018

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Last week the story about Cambridge Analytica broke (again). The British analytics firm helped the Trump campaign to build a massive voter database to inform micro-targeting campaigns. The goal was to reach voters on an individual level with messages they are recpetive to in order to persuade them to vote for the "right" candidate. So far, this is nothing new. Obama has used this approach in 2008 and 2012 and Hillary Clinton has used this form of voter targeting as well for sure (on a budget that was certainly bigger than that from the Trump campaign).

What is different with Cambridge Analytica and the Trump campaign are two things: Firstly, they obtained facebook data in very sketchy ways, which is a severe problem, especially on the side of Facebook. The second issue - which is getting the greater attention - is that Cambridge Analytica used something called psychometrics to create psychological profiles of all the voters. This raises two questions: How does it work and is it really that powerful?

The idea behind the Cambridge Analytica tool

The approach of Cambridge Analytica is based on the OCEAN model (or Big Five Model) which is popular in psychology to describe the personality of a person. It is based on five latent personality traits that are represented as scales:

Openness to experience (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious)

Conscientiousness (efficient/organized vs. easy-going/careless)

Extraversion (outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved)

Agreeableness (friendly/compassionate vs. challenging/detached)

Neuroticism (sensitive/nervous vs. secure/confident)

The idea of Cambridge Analytica was as follows: If you know the personality type of a person you can use that to feed them ads and information which they are most receptive to. The problem is: To assess somebody’s personality, you usually have to give them a questionnaire with validated survey items. That poses the question where to get that data for millions of voters. This is where social media and machine learning comes into play.

The original idea was developed by the Cambridge University researcher Michal Kosinski. He developed an app for Facebook which lets people assess their personality type. He then uses the information of the Facebook profiles (which the people agree to be accessed by the application) like their status updates and likes to see which factors are related to which personality type. He claims to have shown "that a wide range of pervasive and often publicly available digital footprints such as Facebook profiles or data from mobile devices can be used to infer personality" (Paper).

This opens the possibility to extrapolate the scores of people on the five personality scales just using their Facebook page information. As people didn't only agree that their profile information was accessible but also the information of their friends, the creator of the app suddenly has a lot of information on a lot of people. Cambridge Analytica didn't get the data from Kosinski but got information on 50 millions Facebook users from another Cambridge researcher Alex Kogan.

How could Cambridge Analytica's algorithm look like

Let's see how it can be done. In this blogpost I will build a super-simplified version of the tool of Cambridge Analytica - or at least what I believe how it looks like. I will start from the end and start by developing two different versions of an ad that match two different personality profiles.

1. Firstly, we need different ads and information that we can feed to people with different personality types. At this point we must make qualitative assumptions about which ads work best for which people. For this blog post we will use one strategy that is believed to be used by Cambridge Analytica: Targeting neurotic voters.

2. Secondly, we need data from an app on Facebook where people were happy to fill out the personality quiz. We will use an anonymised dataset from a personality app that can be used for research purposes.

3. Thirdly, we need an algorithm that lets us extrapolate the personality profile for people who didn’t fill out the questionnaire. For this purpose, we will train a basic machine learning model that predicts whether a facebook user is neurotic or not based on their status updates.

4. Lastly, we need Facebook data from other users which we can then target with our ads. For this step, we will use the Facebook API to get access to public FB profiles.

Step 1: The ads

For this blogpost we will simplify things a bit. Instead of looking at all five factors we will only look at the neuroticism scale. To simplify it even further we will say that people who are above the median of the neuroticism scale are sensitive and nervous and those below are more confident and rational - this makes it a simple classification problem. For both groups we want to design a good fake ad that will appeal to their personality. Let's look at the two versions we want to spread on Facebook:

Version 1: "immigrants ... mayham ... build a wall ... "

The first ad we are using is a classic fear mongering example of a Trump campaign ad. We assume that this one will work well with people with high values on the neuroticism scale.

Version 2: "Crooked Hillary ... emails ... unfit ..."

The second ad creates the image of Hillary Clinton as a corrupt politician. We want to feed this ad to people who are less neurotic and are unlikely to vote for Trump anyways. The goal targeting this group is rather to discourage voting for Clinton and going to the polls on election day.

Step 2: Personality data

Next, we need some data to train our targeting algorithm. If we would have a lot of money and wouldn’t give a damn about ethics we would just buy the data from some personality app-provider. Luckily, we don't have to go there and can just use a dataset provided by Kosinski himself. He published a dataset on 10.000 Facebook updates by 250 users. For those users we also have the scores for the personality traits as they used the Kosinksi's FB app. The data is anonymised, and the users agreed that the data can be used for research purposes. The dataset can be downloaded here .

As already mentioned above, we simplify things again. Let's say we only want to assess whether one Facebook status was written by a neurotic person. Neglecting that the 10.000 updates are not independent from each other, we now have some data points to train our model. Obviously, we can't expect to get a great model fit as we try to make a prediction based on a facebook post.

Before we build the model we first must clean and prepare the data. We perform a median split on the neuroticism variable to create our two groups we want to target (1=neurotic, 0=balanced). We then clean the status updates by removing stop words, numbers, punctuation and endings to retain only the word stems. We then create a document term matrix, which provides us with single words as features to build our classifiers.

If we check the in-sample accuracy we see that our algorithm can classify 70 % of the status updates correctly. This is not great and we haven’t even checked how good it classifies new examples, but it doesn't matter. We don't have to provide any evidence of how good our algorithm works anyways (as Cambridge Analytica isn't revealing their algorithms either - obviously). We will just say we created a "psychological warfare tool". Something with machine learning, big data, facebook and personality traits. People will buy it.

Step 4: Use the classifier to target new voters

We can now classify people just based on their facebook updates and use the information to feed them the ads they are more receptive to. If we are an unethical and scrupulous data company we would use the information to update our huge database of semi-legally or illegally obtained facebook users. We will instead use the Facebook API to get some status updates from public facebook profiles. Let's determine which ad we should show Paul Ryan, speaker of the House of Representatives, as an example:

library(Rfacebook)
token

[1] 0
Levels: 0 1

Our classifier would suggest that Paul Ryan is in the calmer, more rational group. Therefore, we would show him the second ad (the anti-Clinton ad).

Wrap-Up: Is it really that scary?

This blogpost walked you through how I imagine how the Cambridge Analytica Targeting Tool roughly works. I have no idea how it actually looks like, how accurate it is and how it is used. The real algorithm includes many more features and a multidimensional outcome, but you can probably imagine how well it could work if it is trained on large datasets. However, how good that works is questionable. You can try out what your FB data reveals about you with the tool by Kosniski on his page https://applymagicsauce.com/. My results were not impressive at all: It got my religious orientation, my political orientation and education background all wrong (so if you're really worried about this mind manipulation thing, maybe try the website and you will feel much better afterwards). In the end, the inference about someone's personality type is based on the correlation of likes and personality profiles in the training data. That can easily go wrong.

Even if the algorithm is really efficient in predicting the five personality traits, the question remains if it is actually effective in getting people to buy a product or even vote for a specific candidate. There is not much evidence about the effects and their magnitude of psychmetric microtargeting. The idea of using available information to micro-target internet users is not new. Quite the opposite, it is the main business model of companies like Google and Facebook. They will use data such as your demographic background, which device you use, where you go shopping, who your friends are, what pages you like and so on to optimize their ad targeting (again, mostly based on correlational evidence). Personally, I am highly sceptical that this new layer of building psychometric models is really improving micro-targeting as much as Cambridge Analytica claims it does.

I think it is fair to say that Cambridge Analytica is dangerous in the way they are meddling in elections around the world in a highly unethical and often illegal ways. I also understand that the media jumps on the narrative of "Bannon/Trump + unethical data science company + Facebook + big data + mind manipulation", because it sounds scary. However, I would argue that big data and mind manipulation are the two smallest problems in this equation and we should not just repeat the narrative of a company that wallows in this public image of omnipotence. Cambridge Analytica sure knows how to market their services or to use the words of Alexander Nix, founder of CA: "It doesn't have to be true, it just has to be believed."